As you know, I recently defected from my Volvo back to an Audi. Well, the Swedes are displeased and have put together an ad that was clearly engineered by top scientist to be so pretty as to render me both utterly remorseful and desperately ready to return to their be-coat’d arms.
It’s working.
Well, folks, it’s that time again: ordering my next leased vehicle. I went round and round on what I wanted to do this time and thought I’d settled on the newest instance of the A3 to make it to the States. But the more I thought about getting a little sedan, the less excited I found myself. I’ve enjoyed my S60 and all of it’s sedan-ish-ness, don’t get me wrong, but there’s something so practical and quirky about a European car with a hatch.
As the next A3 Sportback is not destined to make an appearance here for another model year without all wheel drive I figured the Q3 would be my absolute best bet. I’ve liked it since its debut to the world in 2011 and have been struck by it every time I see one on an out-of-country excursion. And it reminds me of the A3 I had in 2009, especially with those weird toggle style temperature controls. Plus, the familiar zippy handling definitely didn’t hurt its case. So a Florett Silver/Chestnut Brown example is being assembled in Wolfsburg for me over these next couple of weeks. Expect much fretting and nerdy levels of tracking in the days ahead.
With just under a month still to go in its campaign, I’m happy to say that I’ve become one of the backers that have pushed the EO1 from Electric Objects well (read: 811% as of this morning) past its funding target. It’s going to be a long wait until May 2015 when I can get my very own infinite-art-collection-in-a-frame.
The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers
In celebration of Darwin’s 205th birthday yesterday, The Appendix urges visitors to check out the original manuscript of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Why? Well, aside from some interesting notes in the margins and amazing drawings from the birthday boy himself, there are also these amazing drawings, like above, from his children (all ten of them). Honestly, I’d hang most of them on my walls without thinking twice.
More than once you’ll find yourself asking: Is that stairway really a dead end? And the answer is, probably not.Monument Valley is full of optical illusions that test your spatial reasoning. But it’s your job to figure out what’s real, what’s fake and how you can bridge the gap between those two states using the visual cues from the game.
– Liz Stinson, Wired
Profile: Installation Robots in Residence with Alexander Reben and Brent Hoff from Submarine Channel on Vimeo.
“So perhaps the real use of this project will be to get some robots out into the world and let people express themselves in an ongoing way.”
Honestly, I don’t think io9 was excited enough about the supercapacitor – found by accident – profiled in this video. Holy crud, this could change so much so quickly if it all pans out!
Japan’s new ‘communications robot’ will prevent astronauts from getting lonely in space — by being absolutely adorable.
Yep. (Thanks, io9.)
I’m glad creator Mike Ando was so patient with his dream of building the linking book from Myst. As an ardent fan of the game and its sequels, I was beyond excited to see this story pop up on Wired – and the teenager in me flipped his shit while watching the video. I’ll take one!
I used to buy a new computer every 6 months when I was a decade younger. I’d package up and eBay the previous generation gear and roll the money into the latest and greatest from Apple twice a year. But when I got my 13″ MacBook in October of 2008, I found that the cycle had played itself out. 2009, 2010 and even 2011 came and went and the designs were mostly the same – and my little notebook kept chugging right along without any real issues.
This last year of freelance projects and a need for occasional forays into Windows has become increasingly sluggish, though. And then the advent of the Retina display on notebooks sealed the deal: it was time to upgrade, both for my strained eyes and for my cooked lap, burned under a more and more taxed set of four year old components.
So I plunked down an ungodly sum of money and placed an order for the above 13″ MacBook Pro on launch day today. I’ll be checking the tracking site and scouting the driveway for FedEx trucks nonstop from here until up to 5 business days from now. In some ways, perhaps nothing has changed in the last ten years…